sheep, boar and aurochs, the giant cattle that had lived in the marshland near the shore where they had grown up, animals he and Enlil had corralled as boys and fattened for the blood sacrifice. But now the animals had all died, and they had devoured the flesh. The bull had been the last, killed as it lay on the thwarts bellowing with thirst and hunger. Noah had plunged the knife into its chest and drawn out the heart as he had done with bulls many times before, on the altar of their ancestors outside the spirit cave. Its hooves were still tied to the cross-beams, and the skull lay in the scuppers of the boat beside him, stripped of every morsel of flesh, the bone plastered over and painted in red ochre with the horns facing the bow. They had fed on the bull in a great feast after they had passed through the storms, and had drunk its blood in huge gulps. But that had been half a cycle of the moon ago. Since then there had been nothing more to eat. Only a few of those who had feasted then were still alive now.
‘My brother,’ Enlil croaked again. ‘You seek strength in the spirit world of our ancestors.’ He shook his head, then rattled the spear. ‘This is my strength, the metal that made this spear strong, the spear that has given us food.’
Noah squinted at the copper spearhead glinting in the sun. He remembered that day in the volcano as boys when they had searched for the obsidian. Enlil had gone further than any among the shamans had dared to go before, into the deepest chamber where the red-hot molten rock seeped out of the underworld. He had seen a golden stream flow among the molten red, and had watched it blend with silvery rock and form a hard metal. He had sworn Noah to secrecy, had not even told their father; only Enlil knew where it was to be found. And then, years later, as a man, he had emerged one day from the volcano and stood in front of the people, brandishing weapons of metal that made his shaman name seem like a prophecy: Gilgamesh, he who would stand above men, he who would be a god. Now, on this voyage, the spear had brought down a great bird, its wingspan three times a man’s reach, and had jabbed and killed a turtle. And then a whale had circled them, one bigger than they had ever seen before, blowing spray high into the sky. The fishy smell from the whale’s blow had left them ravenous. The old man Naher in Haran’s boat had slipped into the water with a spear tied to a pig’s bladder, and had used all his strength to drive it into the whale’s head. Haran had lashed his boat to the carcass, and Noah as shaman had been given the first strip of oily skin. But then the blood in the water had attracted the sharks, more numerous and fearsome than they had seen before. The sharks had gorged themselves in a frenzy, ripping the whale to pieces, and then the great monster had reared up from the depths, leaping out of the water with its teeth bared. It had crushed Haran’s boat and consumed them all, Haran and the old man and the others, dragging them down into the underworld, to the blackness Noah had seen in the depths below. He narrowed his eyes at his brother. That was what spears of metal had done for them.
Enlil swayed, leaning on his spear. ‘And we have no women.’ Noah felt his chest tighten. No women. It had been a week since sweet-voiced Ishtar had died a terrible, rasping death in the bottom of the boat, taken by the malevolence that now stalked them. The sea had seethed and sparkled, and then a vast welter of bubbles had erupted on the surface, swallowing Ishtar’s boat and leaving her floating unconscious, wrapped around with the thin, glistening tentacles of the blue jellyfish that infested these waters, filaments that tingled to the touch and sent agonizing jolts through the body. They had hauled her into Noah’s boat still alive, and after she had died he covered her in red ochre and laid her on a raft of seaweed. She had worn her boar’s tusk necklace, and held her wooden staff with the vulture skull on top, its eyes made from the sacred blue rock the hunters had brought from the mountains far to the east. Ishtar was to have been their mother’s successor, trained as a shaman, but then she had been swayed from the old ways by Enlil and his followers, those who had set up idols in the shape of men, gods they fashioned after themselves. Noah had stared at her body in the knowledge that he was now the last shaman of Atlantis, the last who knew the rapture of the spirit journeys and how to spill blood on the altar of sacrifice.
He had watched the birds swoop down, tearing off strips of flesh from Ishtar’s body, just as the vultures had done in Atlantis where the dead had been exposed in the stone circle above the city. After two days he had severed her head, filled her eye sockets and covered the sinews of her face with plaster he kept in a pot in the bow, placing cowrie shells in the hollows where her eyes had been pecked out. Her skull was there now, embedded in plaster below the prow, half in and half out of the spirit world. Noah had told his brother that the birds were the spirits of their ancestors taking her amongst them. Enlil had replied that the birds were hungry. Enlil had lost touch with the spirit world, spending all of his days in Atlantis inside the citadel. Noah had still walked past the fields their fathers had learned to cultivate, and had lived in the forest where their grandfathers had hunted, at one with the animal spirits. He had only ever entered the citadel to mount the steps up the volcano and perform his duty as sacrificing shaman, a duty that Enlil and the others had come to scorn.
Noah remembered the monster of the deep, lurking below, what it had done to Haran’s boat, how it enslaved them with fear. Out here, the spirits of the beasts still ruled, not the gods that Enlil and the others thought they themselves had become, wielding their spears of metal.
Enlil banged the thwart again. ‘There is no land ahead.’
Noah raised his arm to the west, pointing. ‘But my brother, I saw it. Through a gap in the storm clouds before the great calm. Twin peaks on the horizon, exactly as our mother Nisir prophesied, the mountain she called Du-Re. I saw distant breakers, and I felt a change in the rhythm of the waves. We will go there if we summon all our reserves and paddle west. We will find new animals, new pasture. We will find women.’
‘Your visions are mere dreams. The flat sea is like the desert. The sun reflects off it and blinds you to reality, creating phantasms on the horizon. And for half a cycle of the moon, since the storms ended, we have seen nothing.’
But Noah knew what he had seen. And two nights before, there had been another sign. He had succumbed to hunger, and had devoured the strip of whale skin that had been given to him when they had cut into the carcass. Eating it had given him terrible sickness, as if the spirit of the whale were punishing him. But when he awoke, the sickness had passed and the torpor had lifted. His mouth had stopped bleeding, and the swelling of his gums had receded. It had been a sign of what he must do next. Now he squinted at Enlil. ‘I must offer blood to the spirits.’
Enlil waved his arm dismissively. ‘If you pour blood into the sea, the great shark will come for you. He is hungry, like those gulls.’
‘Then you can kill him with your spear of metal.’
Enlil snorted. ‘I would not waste it. This spear and others like it will make us gods amongst men. When they escaped the deluge, our cousins Adad and Nergal and Ninurta and Annunaki set forth south over land to the great rivers beyond the mountains, and Ishmael and Sethi and Minos sailed through the islands south from Troy, towards the far shore where the great river rises through the desert and waters the oases along its banks. They will found new citadels in those places. But I am the only one with the secret of the new metal, of the alloy that creates the strong copper.’
‘You swore that you would never reveal it. I warned you of its dangers. Men will use it to kill each other.’
‘As long as I alone have the knowledge of the metal, others will bow towards me. I will use that strength to keep peace among men.’
Noah looked at Enlil. He remembered how his brother had seemed a pillar of strength in his lionskin, its torn head and tattered mane now hanging over his shoulders. Herakleos, the Ladies of the West had called him, after the great rock that marked the edge of the Middle Sea, as they showered him with adulation that Noah feared would go to his head. For all Enlil’s bravado, Noah knew that his brother was afraid of what might lie before them, afraid because he had spurned the ways of the shamans who saw the ocean in their spirit journeys, for whom the unending horizon brought not terror as it seemed to bring Enlil and his followers, but instead the rapture Noah felt in the journeys of the mind he took in the spirit cave, journeys where he floated towards the world of their ancestors. ‘We are close,’ Noah said. ‘Look to your own signs. The crystal lights the way forward. The palladion has become heavier, just as our mother prophesied. When the spirit bird flies out from Du-Re towards us, when the palladion becomes as heavy as it felt in the spirit cave in the volcano, there we will find our new Atlantis.’
Enlil put down his spear and lifted a package from the floor of his boat, swaddled in a bearskin. He struggled to hold it, then raised one leg on the thwarts and rested the object on his knee. He pulled a lump of quartz out of a pouch on his belt and held it up, averting his eyes from the glare. ‘The crystal shines because it draws in the sun’s rays through the clouds, and when the sun is setting in the west the crystal shines on that side,’ he said, shoving it back in the pouch. He pointed at the swaddled package. ‘The palladion fell from the sky and was brought from the snows of the north by our ancestors. It becomes heavier now because we are approaching the edge of the world, where the earth meets the heavens. Soon it will become so heavy that it will sink my boat.’
